Melancholy Wedgwood

Included in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 list

“In this unorthodox history, Moon, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, casts aside the traditional, heroic portrait of the English ceramicist and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood and envisions the potter as a symbol of Britain’s post-colonial melancholia. Touching lightly on the well-trodden terrain of Wedgwood’s biography, Moon focusses on the story’s “leftovers,” among them the amputation of Wedgwood’s leg; his wayward son, Tom; the figure of the Black man in his famous antislavery medallion; and the overworked laborers in his factory. Moon’s overarching thesis—that destructiveness is inherent in colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism—is nothing groundbreaking, but her mode of attack, at once bold and surreptitious, succeeds in challenging the established, too-cozy narrative about her subject.”
—the New Yorker

“The book explores [Josiah Wedgwood’s] life in a disabled body (his right leg was amputated because of smallpox), his impulse to look for and create materials that would last forever, his support of the abolitionist cause, and it interrogates the project of biography itself, asking ‘What does one do with the narrative leftovers … inadvertently left behind as the fragile remains of the past?’ Moon, assistant curator in European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collects the fragments and assembles a new vessel to hold the life and times of this man, and in doing so, reveals to us something of ourselves right now.”
—The Boston Globe

Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror and coeditor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. She teaches at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

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